With the globalization of business, industry and trade wherein transactions and activities within these fields have been changing from localized organizations to diverse transactions over the face of the world, the telecommunications industries have, accordingly, been expanding rapidly. While telecommunications technology development has been advancing to keep pace with expanded demands, communication channel bandwidth remains a relatively costly commodity. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted via a given communications channel in a given unit of time (generally one second). Channel and bandwidth shortages still remain the factors that limit the full effectiveness of long distance telecommunications; particularly the cost of long range mobile telecommunications. Because of this rapid expansion of industry and commerce telecommunication bandwidth needs, over the past decade, the telecommunications industry has been rapidly expanding the worldwide infrastructure needed to satisfy these needs.
This has resulted in an unusual dichotomy in the telecommunications industry for users needing to buy bandwidth for telephone calling. There is, on the one hand, a surplus of bandwidth available to business and personal consumers; but, on the other hand, the cost of such bandwidth may, under certain conditions, be very high. This is because organizations in the telecommunications industry have made huge investments in the infrastructure to provide the necessary bandwidth and need to recoup such investments in order to function.
As a result, telecommunication service providers that distribute such bandwidth attempt to offer bandwidth to users under fee plans, i.e. sets of predetermined calling conditions that will maximize the provider's profits; but are still financially attractive to business and personal consumers. As a result, properly managed selection of service providers and conditions under which telecommunication are made can be very advantageous to business and personal users. However, if such users fail to properly manage the calls relative to defined calling conditions, the results can be very costly.
In addition, in mobile wireless telecommunications from mobile wireless telephones, bandwidth usage is still quite costly. Channel and bandwidth shortages still remain the factors that limit the efficiency of wireless long range mobile telecommunications and maintain the cost of such wireless communications at a premium.